Dennis Hollingsworth

a few notes

Here are a few notes regarding this recent painting:

The first intention was signaled by the postings, "Sketching" / "Thinking Out Loud"/"Aloud".

On the left of the screen was an image of a work on paper done before we left the States at the beginning of this year. On the right is a recent summer painting, a cropped detail. I thought that I could paint two categorical types, a sketchy rendering of a painting ( a sheet of paint drawn in a painterly manner) and the larger surfaces that will explore the line of investigation implied by the last three paintings of my recent show in Z?rich.

The scrape off was the realization that if I'm steering towards scale and punch, sketches and whitened smooth trowelled surfaces aren't the best way to go. The additional friction that accompanied this was the problem of scaling up something the dimensions of this laptop to the size of arms outstreached. It wasn't working. The beauty I see in the creamy dimension of form plus color comes from a wrist and I was stubbornly looking for the same things from the turn of the shoulder. It didn't work. I would need one of those mechanno suits Sigorney Weaver wore at the end of one of her "Alien" movies. Technological prothesis and all that(shades of Car City). Fifty kilo units of paint applied with robotic arms with roundhouse throws. Gundam action painter!

There was a bed of alizarin crimson that remained after the scrape off.

I did in fact, go to sleep disgusted and awoke with a mental image of how to proceed. It wasn't a complete or clear image, but it was a metal picture of how to continue, a spread of raw sienna against the red background.

Through it all, I sweated two extremes:

-Slap happy unconscious paint scumbling (brushes) that seems too gratuitous to do today (apologetic bows to Joan Mitchell and Monet with his water lillies).

-The state of the frozen gesture that leans towards immobility. Seek more information per unit area. Cram more data into each per joule expended.

And I tried to bend together the best of both. A compound bow.